Tag: blogspam

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I woke up to ten or so first-time comments* in the moderation queue at Speed Force this morning. As I started reading them I was briefly confused: they were well-written, specific comments about comic books….that had nothing to do with the posts they were attached to. Complaining about Bendis’ writing on an interview with Paul Ryan (the artist, not the politician). Gushing about an Ultra-Humanite figure on a review of a Flash comic. Tips on finding exclusive Aquaman figures on a Flash TV episode review.

Then I felt strangely nostalgic, because I hadn’t seen this sort of spam in a long time.

As near as I can tell, the spammer finds a related site, scrapes comments from it, and pastes them into the target site. To what end I’m not sure, because the comments all linked to Facebook profiles. Most comment spam seems to be about link generation to prop up a spamvertised site in search rankings. But sure enough, when I searched for phrases from the spammy comments, I found the originals on a Daredevil fan blog, an action figure site, an artist’s blog, and so on.

I’ve got to give the spammer a little credit for two things:

  1. Finding actual comics-related blogs to scrape comments from.
  2. Inserting typos to make it harder to match. Though Google’s pretty good at fixing those.

In the end, though…

plonk!

*I have WordPress set up so that first-time commenters always go through moderation, while returning commenters are allowed through unless they trips a filter.

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Spam is annoying at the best of times, but over the years I’ve learned to tune it out (and in some cases find amusement in it). But a spam comment that I’ve been seeing across several blogs lately is just plain insulting.

I see a lot of interesting content on your page. You have to spend a lot of time writing, i know how to save you a lot of time, there is a tool that creates unique, SEO friendly posts in couple of minutes… [Search terms omitted because I don’t want to give them the publicity.]

Right: So I’ve got interesting content, I clearly spend a lot of time writing, but you’re telling me I should use some tool to auto-generate everything instead. Autogenerate this, jerkwad!

Though I do have to admit I’m amused at the idea of autogenerated spam clogging up the comment sections of autogenerated articles…

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Here’s another comment spammer whose software plugged in every phrase on its generic comment list instead of picking one at random. Notice how vague these tend to be, so that they could easily apply to almost any post on almost any site.

If you see any of these comments show up on your blog, chances are good that it’s a spammer trying to get a backlink to their shady site, not someone who actually wants to contribute to the conversation.

(Originally cross-posted from LOL Spam)

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You’ve probably seen it: comments that say something entirely vague and either flattering or condescending, that could apply to just about any article. And then they link to an “escort” site, or a pill seller…or some small-town insurance office in the middle of nowhere who hired a black hat “SEO expert” who promised he’d get them backlinks and doesn’t care about the site’s reputation.

I got a great one last week: Somehow instead of getting one randomly-chosen message from a set, I got all of them in one comment: Continue reading →

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I’ve been seeing a lot of those "I just found your blog by searching and it’s the best thing since sliced bread" comment spams lately, some even slipping through Akismet. But this one was just hilarious in its unreadability:

Virtuous what I used to be in search of and quite thoroughgoing as floor. Many thanks for placard this, I noticed a yoke diverse associated posts but yours was the optimum thus far. I outlook it stays updated, adore worry.